[Sigia-l] MS Indexing Service 3.0

[Avi Rappoport]

At 2:23 PM +0000 2/5/04, Emma Dawson wrote:
>I'm in the process of designing an intranet site for a small research
>organisation with a huge repository of so far unmanaged and virtually
>unorganised electronic documents, comprising of their own, and other
>people's research.  An absolute necessity for the intranet site is a
>search tool.
>
>One of the suggestions that has come up is the possibility of using the
>MS Indexing Service - this is partially due to the lack of cost - but
>also because there is a perception that this would be an easy and hassel
>free solution.

MS Index is one of my least favorite search engines.  It has a very 
odd configuration system and the last I saw, it would only index 
files on mounted volumes -- no spider at all.  The default interface 
is ugly as sin and the relevance ranking doesn't work well.  I'm not 
the only one who dislikes it -- it gets bad ratings from users in my 
surveys.

There are better free and low-cost search engines that are easier to 
deploy and use, see <http://www.searchtools.com> for listings (a bit 
old, sorry).

Best of luck,

Avi
(looking for an intern to help with the web site)

-- 
   Avi Rappoport, Search Engine Consultant <mailto:avirr at searchtools.com> 
   Complete Guide to Search Engines for Web Sites and Intranets
             <http://www.searchtools.com>